JUSTUS VON LIEBIG. 263 
many other things in addition, which perhaps cost him more trouble 
to acquire, than they cost other people. 
Lessing says that talent really is willand work, and Tam very much 
inclined to agree with him. 
The lectures of Gay-Lussac, Thenard, Dulong, ete., in the Sorbonne, 
had for me an indescribable charm; the introduction of astronomical or 
mathematical method into chemistry, which changes every problem when 
possible into an equation, and assumes in every uniformsequence of two 
phenomena a quite certain connection of cause and effect, which, after 
it has been searched for and discovered, is called “ explanation” or 
“theory,” had led the French chemists and physicists to their great 
discoveries. This kind of “theory” or “explanation” was as good as 
unknown in Germany, for by these expressions was understood not 
something ‘¢ experienced,” but always something which man must add 
on, and which he fabricates. 
French exposition has, through the genius of the language, a logical 
clearness in the treatment of scientific subjects very difficult of attain- 
ment in other languages, whereby Thenard and Gay-Lussac acquired 
a mastery in experimental demonstration. The lecture consisted of a 
judiciously arranged succession of phenomena,—that is to say, of experi- 
ments, whose connection was completed by oral explanations. The 
experiments were a real delight to me, for they spoke to me in a lan- 
guage I understood, and they united with the lecture in giving definite 
connection to the mass of shapeless facts which lay mixed up in my 
head without order or arrangement. The anti-phlogistic or French 
chemistry had, it is true, brought the history of chemistry before Lavoi- 
sier to the guillotine; but one observed that the knife only fell on the 
shadow, and I was much more familiar with the phlogistic writings of 
Javendish, Watt, Priestly, Kirwan, Black, Scheele, and Bergmann, 
than with the anti-phlogistic; and what was represented in the Paris 
lectures as new and original facts appeared to me to be in the closest 
relation to previous facts, so much so, indeed, that when the latter were 
imagined away the others could not be. 
I recognized or (more correctly perhaps), the consciousness dawned 
upon me, that a connection in accordance with fixed laws exists not 
only between two or three, but between all chemical phenomena in the 
mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms; that no one stands alone, 
but each being always linked with another, and this again with another, 
and so on, all are connected with each other, and that the genesis and 
disappearance of things is an undulatory motion in an orbit. 
What impressed me most in the French lectures was their intrinsic 
truth, and the careful avoidance of all pretense in the explanations; it 
was the most complete contrast to the German lectures, in which the 
whole scientifie teaching had lost its solid construction through the 
preponderance of the deductive method. 
